


In Her Own Words

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Adultery, Angst with a Happy Ending, Chakotayislovely, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Janewayismessedup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-01-11
Packaged: 2019-03-03 15:48:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13344420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "How can he know, he can’t possibly know, and yet here it is anyway and she’s telling it to him - to someone - for the first time in her life, in her own words."Janeway and Chakotay discuss her relationship with Owen Paris.





	In Her Own Words

**Author's Note:**

> This totally grew out of a crazed Tumblr conversation with my fandom BFF and beta-extraordinaire Mia Cooper (so a massive thank you to her) and the serendipitous fact that I came across the quote which influenced it precisely two minutes after that conversation took place. 
> 
> It's not novel compliant (because Owen is still alive in this), but it could happen after 'Endgame'.
> 
> and FYI, when I picture Owen Paris he's played by Liam Neeson. Enjoy.

* * *

“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”

  
―  **Tennessee Williams** ,  **Cat on a Hot Tin Roof**

* * *

She closes out the screen, tips her head forward onto the desk, against the cool, clean surface. It’s calming against her cheek, and she closes her eyes and breathes to prevent the rising wave of panic that is threatening to engulf her.

Orders, she thinks, can really be fucking awful at times.

“Coffee?”

She lifts her head up, setting her palms against the desk, and sits back.

“Anything stronger?”

“It’s a Saturday afternoon,” he laughs. “I can’t believe you just took a comm in your pyjamas. Last night’s wine?”

“It’s a tank ” she mutters, half-irritated at his teasing.

“A tank top you wore to bed,” he grins.

She doesn’t answer, but she knows her face is wrought plain with her disdain. He frowns, clearly aware his jokes aren’t landing at all. He changes tactics.

“Seemed urgent,” he says as she stands and walks past him, heading to the kitchen to get the coffee he promised anyway.

“It was,” she programmes two shots of espresso and the merest water to dilute, and downs half the cup.

“Care to elaborate?”

He comes up behind her, curls his strong hands around her waist and onto her stomach, and the instant peace she feels - while fragile - helps her regain her footing. She tips her head back, settles it against his chest, and closes her eyes and enjoys the moment of perfidy, of letting him think he knows her as well as he thinks he does.

It’s been peaceful, in her head, for so long now, and she doesn’t want to shatter that peace, because it will spread like a fissure, branching and breaking along lines she cannot patch. And it will crack open all of the mistakes, all of the things she’s had to lock away in boxes, far from the light of every day.

“If you don’t want to,” he mutters against her neck, “that’s okay too.”

“I have to go out,” she says after a moment, and she looks down at his hands and twists his wedding band with her fingers.

“Oh it’s top secret,” he says lightly, squeezing her middle. “Alright. Shall I have dinner ready?”

“I’m hoping it’ll be brief,” she turns in his arms.

“Oh good, so we’ll still get our Saturday night?”

“You can rest assured this is one meeting I don’t want to drag out,” she says, trying to smile.

He watches her go, she feels his eyes on her back, and she knows he’s contemplating following her.

Despite her best attempts, he is incredibly good at seeing straight through her - though he always has been - and in this case she may even welcome it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t in her nature to resist it too, to have him draw it out of her as he always has, with skill and gentleness which traps her into candidness.

He’s her best and most forgiving confessor, and she feels the inevitability of the truth spilling out like she knows the stars or the table of elements.

Intimately. With a depth of certainty.

She sets out a uniform, takes a quick shower and spends more time on her makeup and her hair than she normally would.

She chooses to ignore the fact that there is something terribly competitive in this preening, or maybe she’s using it as armour. Cosmetics as defence. Trying to defend the indefensible.

It feels pitiful. And she has no right to defence anyway. Not as the perpetrator.

She emerges into their airy sitting room, and she looks out to the Bay for a moment before turning to his chair. The dog is propped on his lap, and there is a book propped on the dog’s back, and one hand effortlessly flicks pages while the other combs over Delta’s coat.

She can’t believe she has to leave the peace of this, and crawl back into a past which makes her shudder with indignity.

She starts peeling the jacket off, feels her palms beginning to sweat, changes her mind and shrugs the jacket back on. Her breathing gathers pace and the room begins to sway.

She edges towards the replicator, orders a coffee with fingers that are shaking, and when she turns she almost collides with him, nose bouncing off his chest as he just rescues the drink, not without a spill on her admiral’s jacket, in his broad hands.

“I don’t know what it is,” he sets the cup down, “but whatever it is, it isn’t worth this kind of panic.”

“You don’t know what it is,” she snaps, “and it isn’t panic.”

“Then what is it?”

He rests against the counter top, and watches as she sponges the coffee off her jacket.

“Shame.”

She knows the word catches him off guard, because she hears the slight hitch in his breath.

Shame isn’t an emotion she normally attaches herself to, and she knows its connotations are universally concerning. It just feels uncomfortable to say, sliding over so many possibilities that it must make any spouse tense with the mention.

Though he knows her - most of her - even her husband isn’t impervious to that kind of worry.

“Oh.”

“Yes, ‘Oh’.”

She hangs her head and then looks him in the eye.

“For better or for worse?”

He nods, “I think we’ve established that I meant that. That we  _both_ did.”

She braces her hands against the marble counter tops, then breathes.

“First of all, the  _Newton_  has been held up -“ the look of panic on his face makes her digress. “B’Elanna and Tom are safe. Nothing terrible, diplomatic difficulty as opposed to a violent one, and so Miral needs a guardian for another few weeks. Because of the sensitivity of the mission, they’d rather someone from the brass delivered the news to Julia in person, since Admiral Paris is also off-planet.”

She can see he is no further forward in his understanding of her strange behaviour, and she can hardly blame him.

“So you’ve to go to Julia?”

“Uh huh.”

“I don’t get it,” he holds his palms out, “I thought it was something awful.”

She swallows the burgeoning lump in her throat, because it’s starting to deprive her of air.

“It is.” She breathes in again, feels bile replacing the lump. “Julia Paris isn’t my greatest fan.”

She consciously ignores the fact she’s couching Julia Paris’ loathing in a worn-out metaphor.

He remains quiet, and she can see he is navigating his own knowledge, checking if he’s missed something from a previous conversation. He’s racking his brains, trying to work it out.

“I had an affair with Owen, Chakotay,” she cannot watch him look for information he doesn’t have, so it flies out of her mouth quickly, spat with the kind of vehemence she only reserves for her worst crimes.

He looks momentarily startled, blinks a few times, but remains mute.

“I was losing it, I mean really. It was after Justin and dad, my whole life was ambition and my career and he was mentoring me from a distance. I was drinking when I wasn’t working, and screwing about all over the galaxy. My mother asked him to take me under his wing, one thing led to another... It had always been there, you know?”

How can he know, he can’t possibly know, and yet here it is anyway and she’s telling it to him - to someone - for the first time in her life, in her own words. In the moment, it had been her mother’s humiliated disapproval, or her sister’s treacherous glee, or Owen’s analytical justifications, or Julia’s irate pain, that had coloured the narrative, not her own story or voice. She hadn’t told her version of events. She’d remained defiantly silent while a crisis had quietly erupted around her, and through the back corridors of the Admiralty, and just wished she’d never let him strip her off and lie her down and make her forget the kind of pain she had been growing in her bones.

“How do you know, you can’t know,” she goes on. “I wasn’t naive, I knew exactly what I was doing. He’d always been there for me - he felt guilty, you know, about the Cardassians -“

“He’s always had a thing for you, rather,” Chakotay cuts in, and he’s been silent for so long she’s forgotten he had a voice in this at all.

“No.”

He shrugs, “I’ve seen the way he looks at you, Kathryn. Even now.”

He’s not threatened, and he’s certainly not surprised by her revelation.

She doesn’t know how to take that.

“You’re not surprised?”

“No,” he says gently. “I always thought you were tactfully polite to each other, but I know what a man who is attracted to a woman looks like. And I know what history looks like too. I also suspected something from your past influenced your very strict rules about the captain having anything other than a platonic relationship with a member of her crew. You don’t like the idea of taking advantage -“

“Owen didn’t take advantage of me.”

He just raises his brow, and goes to the replicator and orders another coffee, quiet as he does so. He hands her it, and she realises her own hands are still trembling.

“Didn’t he?”

She shakes her head from behind the cup.

“I was a woman, and I -“ she chokes on the admission, “I wanted it as much as he did.”

Chakotay gives a small, disapproving smile and it has to be the most derailing thing he could possibly do in the moment. It makes her feel cracked wide open, and exposed for the awful person he already knows she can be.

“So Julia...?”

“Found out. Owen’s aide de camp told her,” she says softly. “She’s a dignified woman, and it wasn’t his first extramarital affair. But I was Edward’s daughter, she and my mother had suffered many a gathering together and many a deep space mission fraught with worry. My father mentored Owen when he was commissioned as a Rear Admiral. It was...”

She doesn’t know what to say. She feels defeated by the reality of it, even though it’s history now.

“Messy?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it,” she answers. “I think if my mother hadn’t loved me with all her heart, she would have annihilated me. And Julia Paris...well, she feels how she feels. And she’s right to feel it.”

He takes a deep breath, then steps towards her.

“Do you want me to come? I can wait outside?”

She is blindsided by his acceptance, the lack of judgement in his response. She didn’t expect condemnation, because she knows him, but still it takes her by surprise, even now, that he manages to see past her flaws, which are multitudinous and ripe in their severity. 

She steps into the space between them, fills it.

“Will I ever do anything which will make you see -“

He holds a hand up, signals for her silence. 

“Nothing, nothing’s enough to change how I feel.”

She slides her fingers into his and leans into him.

“You’re a fool Chakotay.”

“And you’re too hard on yourself.”

She shakes her head, rises up on her toes to kiss him.

“What do you need me to do?”

She sighs.

“Be here when I get home, armed with a large whiskey?”

He laughs and then there is quiet for a moment. But she sees curiosity building on the features of his fine face, and she figures that since the proverbial cat has vacated the bag, she might as well feed his appetite for answers. 

“Ask away.”

“Why did you take on Tom?”

“I owed him it,” she answers.

At this his face darkens, and the only anger he’s thus far displayed appears in his eyes.

“You owed Owen Paris nothing!”

“Not Owen,” she clarifies gently. “Tom, I owed it to Tom. His home life was already shambolic, with an often absent and cold father, and a difficult mother. I mean, I knew what it was like to have a father whose career was front and centre. And I made it a good thousand times worse. I was the first mistress any of them knew...I don’t think Tom actually knows it was me, but I’ve always felt responsible for his unhappiness.”

He looks at her, measures the response for a moment.

“If everyone atoned for their mistakes the way you do, the world would be a far kinder place. Much less happy, but kinder.”

“I’m not a good per-“

He silences her with a finger on her lips.

“Enough. It’s a Saturday. And I refuse to let you ruin one of our few entire weekends with nothing planned. You got to Julia, I’ll pour a triple, and console you when you get back.”

“You always look after me,” she tips her head against his chest, curls around him and breathes him in.

“It’s what I signed up for,” he kisses his forehead.

“When we married?”

“No, when I blew up my ship for yours. And you know, I know what it looks like to want you. I know what it feels like. I felt it the moment you stopped me killing Tom Paris, and I still feel it now.”

“You’re a masochist,” she says dryly.

He laughs and steps back from her.

“Maybe we should have written our own vows: ‘Do you, Chakotay, masochist and fool-‘“

“Bye,” she laughs, turning on her heels. “I’ll be back in an hour.”

“Good luck.”

She stops dead in her tracks, turns to him and looks at him and feels tears of sheer gratitude gathering.

“Thank you.”

“What for, all the coffees?”

“No, for loving me.”

He smiles, “Every part. Every cell. Past, future, present.”

She turns on her heels, girds herself, and hopes only to return to exactly what she left.  

 


End file.
